Ex-Googler Evan Williams had a startup called Odeo. It was going to be a podcasting platform. Evan asked his friend, another ex-Googler named Biz Stone, to join him. When Apple launched iTunes podcasting, and made Odeo's podcasting platform irrelevant, Evan and Biz and an Odeo employee named Jack Dorsey decided to create something called Twitter instead. Odeo's investors didn't like Twitter, and Evan did them a huge favor by buying back all their stock and making them whole.

According to interviews with about a dozen early investors and employees, the story of how Twitter was actually founded begins with an entrepreneur named Noah Glass, who started Odeo in his apartment.

The story begins about six years ago ...

THE REAL HISTORY OF TWITTER

"Noah had a product where you call a phone number and it would turn your message into an MP3 hosted on the Internet. That was the technology that Noah brought that turned into Odeo," says early employee Ray McClure.

Along with Charles River Ventures and about a dozen other individuals, one of Glass' earliest investors in Odeo was a former Google employee named Evan Williams. Williams was more involved with Odeo than most investors are with startups in their portfolios, and eventually, Odeo moved from Noah's apartment to Williams'. Williams, who had recently sold a company called Blogger to Google, had just bought a nice house and wanted to put his old apartment to good use.

"I think it was something Ev was interested in, but it was mostly Noah's thing," says McClure.

"At that time, it would have been me, Evan [Henshwaw-Plath, better known by friends as "Rabble,"] and Rabble's wife Gabba. Mostly it was the four of us working out of the apartment."

Next, Odeo moved into an office and started hiring more employees — including a quiet, on-again, off-again Web designer named Jack Dorsey and an engineer named Blaine Cook. Evan Williams became Odeo's CEO.

By July 2005, Odeo had a product: a platform for podcasting.

But then, in the fall of 2005, "the shit hit the fan," says George Zachary, the Charles River Ventures partner who led the firm's investment in Odeo.

That was when Apple first announced iTunes would include a podcasting platform built into every one of the 200 million iPods Apple would eventually sell. Around the same time, Odeo employees, from Glass and Williams on down, began to realize that they weren't listening to podcasts as much as they thought they would be.

Says Cook: "We built [Odeo], we tested it a lot, but we never used it."

Suddenly, says Zachary, "the company was going sideways."

By this point, Odeo had 14 people working full time — including now-CEO Evan Williams and a friend of his from Google, Christopher "Biz" Stone.

Williams decided Odeo's future was not in podcasting, and later that year, he told the company's employees to start coming up with ideas for a new direction Odeo could go. The company started holding official "hackathons" where employees would spend a whole day working on projects. They broke off into groups.

Odeo co-founder Noah Glass gravitated toward Jack Dorsey, whom Glass says was "one of the stars of the company." Jack had an idea for a completely different product that revolved around "status" — what people were doing at a given time.

"I got the impression he was unhappy with what he was working on — a lot of cleanup work on Odeo."

"He started talking to me about this idea of status and how he was really interested in status," Glass says. "I was trying to figure out what it was he found compelling about it."

"There was a moment when I was sitting with Jack and I said, 'Oh, I do see how this could really come together to make something really compelling.' We were sitting on Mission St. in the car in the rain. We were going out and I was dropping him off and having this conversation. It all fit together for me."

One day in February 2006, Glass, Dorsey, and a German contract developer Florian Weber, presented Jack's idea to the rest of the company. It was a system where you could send a text to one number and it would be broadcasted out to all of your friends: Twttr.

Noah Glass says it was he who came up with the name "Twttr." "I spent a bunch of time thinking about it," he says. Eventually, the name would become Twitter.

After that February presentation to the company, Evan Williams was skeptical of Twitter's potential, but he put Glass in charge of the project. From time to time, Biz Stone helped out Glass' Twitter team.

And it really was Glass' team, by the way. Not Jack Dorsey's.

Everyone agrees that original inkling for Twitter sprang from Jack Dorsey's mind. Dorsey even has drawings of something that looks like Twitter that he made years before he joined Odeo. And Jack was obviously central to the Twitter team.

But all of the early employees and Odeo investors we talked to also agree that no one at Odeo was more passionate about Twitter in the early days than Odeo's co-founder, Noah Glass.

"It was predominantly Noah who pushed for the project to be started," says Blaine Cook, who describes Glass as Twitter's "spiritual leader."

"He definitely had a vision for what it was," says Ray McClure.

"There were two people who were really excited [about Twitter,]" concurs Odeo investor George Zachary. "Jack and Noah Glass. Noah was fanatically excited about Twitter. Fanatically! Evan and Biz weren't at that level. Not remotely."

Zachary says Glass told him, "You know what's awesome about this thing? It makes you feel like you're right with that person. It's a whole emotional impact. You feel like you're connected with that person."

At one point the entire early Twitter service was running on Glass' laptop. "An IBM Thinkpad," Glass says, "Using a Verizon wireless card."

"It was right there on my desk. I could just pick it up and take it anywhere in the world. That was a really fun time."

Glass insists that he is not Twitter's sole founder or anything like it. But he feels betrayed that his role has basically been expunged from Twitter history. He says Florian Weber doesn't get enough credit, either.

"Some people have gotten credit, some people haven't. The reality is, it was a group effort. I didn't create Twitter on my own. It came out of conversations."

"I do know that without me, Twitter wouldn't exist. In a huge way."

By March of 2006, Odeo had a working Twitter prototype. In July, TechCrunchcovered Twttr for the first time. That same summer, Odeo employees obsessed with Twitter were racking up monthly SMS bills totaling hundreds of dollars. The company agreed to pay those bills for the employees. In August, a small earthquake shook San Francisco and word quickly spread through Twitter — an early 'ah-ha!' moment for users and company-watchers alike. By that fall, Twitter had thousands of users.

By this point, engineer Blaine Cook says it began to feel like there were "two companies" at Odeo — the one "Noah and Florian and Jack and Biz were working on" (Twitter) and Odeo. Twitter, says Ray McClure, "was definitely the thing you wanted to be working on."